MUnA

I’m really excited to announce that one of my paintings has been acquired by the Museu Universitário de Arte (MUnA) in Uberlândia, Brasil. This collection is special to me as it is a university collection, and the work will be available for students to study now and in the future. As part of the acquisition, a text has been written about the work. Below is our email exchange in English and Portuguese.

Excerpt from my original email:

The canvas that has been donated to MUnA is actually not a painting, it is a monotype.

I started working with this technique during my research into the 1960’s Abstract Expressionist movement of New York with special interest in Action Painting and Gestural Abstraction, as I too was searching for a way to explore my unconscious mind and emotions. Like the Abstract Expressionists, I look inward to my own psychological impulses for the guidance of the application of paint to a surface.

During this research I came across a quote by well-known writer and art critic Harold Rosenberg that stated “It (Abstract Expressionism) is a supposed unconscious manifestation of pure creation…” and yet contrary to this, Jackson Pollock, a pioneer of action painting, has been quoted saying, “I can control the flow of paint: there is no accident.”

If one can control the expression of their gesture, then there is only conscious action, and not unconscious manifestation. My own exploration with classic action painting confirms this statement by Pollock, that “there is no accident.” Whether intentional or not, a painter typically becomes accustomed to his gestures, trained through repetitious movements.

In this recent body of work, the goal is to move beyond the comfort of my own gesture. The search for a true unconscious act of painting, for gestures liberated through the unknown, this is what lead me to work with monotypes. I compare them to a pregnancy. I give them all the elements to become a beautiful baby (the paint is the father, the canvas, the womb of the mother), I introduce them, they gestate (water evaporates, the paint solidifies), and then they are born. What will they look like when they are born? I don’t know. Each is a known unknown, but the beauty comes from this unknown.

The resulting works are expressive and energetic, at once both static and alive.